Good article re. Republican Conservatism: Is it Dead? or Just Dormant?

I believe Republican conservatives, fearful about losing their own wealth/gains, have misplaced their sense of right and wrong. They don't realize that their party has been usurped by idealogues with evil intentions for our country -- raising the rich to greater heights, at the expense of the middle class and poor. Of, if they realize this and agree with it (and the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter), that is even worse. Some conservatives are waking up, as evidenced by statements from them quoted in the following article.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/weekend-opinionator-dead-right/

EXCERPT:
Sam Tanenhaus [is] the editor of The Times’s Book Review and Week in Review sections and the author of an essay in this week’s New Republic titled “Conservatism Is Dead.”

Tanenhaus begins by positing that in the current political and economic climate, “movement doctrine has not only been defeated but discredited.” He continues: “even as the right begins to regroup, it is not clear that its leaders have absorbed the full implications of their defeat. They readily concede that the Democrats are in charge and, in Obama, have a leader of rare political skills. Many on the right also admit that the specific failures of the outgoing administration were legion. But what of the verdict issued on movement conservatism itself?”

To make his point, he offers his reading of Edmund Burke’s original conservatism — which he sees as being based “on distrust of all ideologies” and dedicated to the “ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions”; that is, to compromise. He also stresses that the second great conservative figure, Benjamin Disraeli, “advocated ‘just, necessary, expedient’ policies — that is, the policies the public demanded even when they contradicted his own ideological certitudes.”

In postwar America, Tanenhaus tells us, conservatives loyal to this sort of Burkean accommodation (Whittaker Chambers prime among them) have been foiled at every turn by a faction of Republican ideologues and corporatist toadies who are “committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancient regime.” Which brings us to this endgame:

What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one’s own. Liberals did this a generation ago when they shed the programmatic “New Politics” of the left and embraced instead a broad majoritarianism. Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition. At its best, conservatism has served the vital function of clarifying our shared connection to the past and of giving articulate voice to the normative beliefs Americans have striven to maintain even in the worst of times. There remains in our politics a place for an authentic conservatism — a conservatism that seeks not to destroy but to conserve.

Prominent conservative Andrew Sullivan says:
In contemporary America, the right is now in an almost parodic state of ideology. There isn’t just a rigid set of beliefs, indifferent to any time or place (e.g. tax cuts are right in a boom and a recession, in surplus and debt); it is supported by a full-fledged organization or “movement”; this “movement” generates journals and magazines and blogs designed fundamentally to buttress the cause; and the most salient distinction discussed in these circles is between those who are for the cause and those against it (with particular scorn for any dissidents). There is, for good measure, always an enemies list, to maintain morale: the dreaded libruls! New leaders emerge because small groups of the ideological intelligentsia select them on the grounds of their conformance with the ideology — Palin and Jindal spring to mind. Or previously rational figures have to convert to full obedience to the tenets of the new faith if they are to become proper “conservatives” — McCain, Romney, two otherwise capable figures turned into hollow shells by the need to kowtow to fanatics. The final phase of this ghastly cycle is the Limbaugh-Coulter phase, in which nothing is left of the conservative cat, except a preening narcissism-as-entertainment grin.